Hi All,
I'm working on a film that the director and I want to do a LOT of worldizing on. Now I've done some, but I thought I'd throw it out to the brain-trust around here. What speakers do YOU use for worldizing (especially in Outside environments) and why?
Thanks!
It depends what the outcome you want eg worldizing might mean car radio or transistor radio, in which case thats what you would want to replay through... Otherwise studio monitors feed from a car battery with an inverter would like be the go... When worldizing rumbles I found my studio subwoofer was a lot better than my bass guitar amp/bin - I guess in that case it was purity of sub signal that created the most resonance
Powered studio monitors are the best, because they're pretty self contained. The guys at Audio Ease have theirs wired to a car battery.
I would also look for powerful monitors with a flat frequency response, the less "speaker-y" sounding the better; unless you're going for that sound. I've used Genelecs or cheaper Tannoys for this sort of thing, or if you're lazy a car stereo can also do the trick.
Here's a great article on worldizing.
Good luck.
Sorry only found this now.
From what I know the guys from Audio Ease are using a Klein und Hummel PAS 100 speaker for their recent outdoor IRs. The results are pretty nice IMHO. For interiors they surly use studio monitors.
A note on IRs vs. worldizing: Though I have very little worldizing experience myself, I find that the big difference is that while worldizing you can dynamically change the speaker - mic relation and thus create effects that can not be reproduced with IRs.
I would probably use a convolution reverb instead. It's a lot more flexible and it saves a lot of time. But you could make your own IR's. I would use a good and linear active studio monitor as the speaker. If it's over long distances outside, I might try a bigger speaker, like from a PA system.
Since IR's have come up quite a bit and I'm a big fan of them, here's a few suggestions and my .02 on it.
In the example of needing something played through a car stereo, you could always create an IR of not just the car interior, but the impulse being played through the car stereo, thus getting you a much closer result than just trying to capture the acoustics of the car.
An IR is simply the mathematical measurement of the dynamics of an "environment". Impulses don't just simply capture the reverb, but how a specific sound reacts in any variable of "environments" and the software then creates a convolution algorithm from that IR, whether that IR be from a physical space or the limitations and parameters of a specific signal passing through different stages of a piece of hardware, cables and it's settings. Any recording you ever make is essentially an IR of that source signal going through the various stages of processing you imparted upon it. It's now represented as a waveform in a digital file or on tape or whatever the medium. We call it a recording, but in reality it's actually an archive of an impulse response. We just typically don't view it on that much of a microscopic detailed level.
Example: Focusrite's Liquid Mix is essentially just Impulses being recorded through gear with incremental settings so that they can essentially "clone" the gear by creating a range of IR's that it calculates between. Thus supposedly giving you as close as an accurate representation of what that piece of gear is able to do to a signal. In essence, making it much more complex than the single snapshot style of Waves' Q-Clone or a simple Convolution Reverb with minimal parameters.
All the Convolution IR plug-in is doing is imparting the dynamic characteristics of an "environment" on the input sound based off of the dynamics of the IR that's loaded into it. Which is exactly like what we would be doing by "worldizing" something. We're just doing it in the analog realm as opposed to archiving that analog realm for future use as an IR (which is exactly what AudioEase's Speakerphone is). It's really not too far off from how a vocoder works (in a very loose concept).
Whether the results are realistic and usable depends entirely on the quality of the IR made. The only difference is that the IR may offer more or less dynamic control depending on what the IR is made of. You will have less control with an IR of a piece of gear that has countless setting variations than you would of a impulse being recorded in a simple environment that you can do nothing to change besides mic and source placement when creating your IR.
So, to save you time in the future if you happen to need to worldize sounds coming through a car radio a lot. You could maybe spend a day doing cars with different grade stereo's and cabin sizes to create a worldized IR car stereo library to choose from. You could also do this with cellphones, various TV's, radios and so on (Or you could buy Speakerphone, but that takes the fun and a bit of the originality out of it in my opinion). Personally, when making my own IR's I would use various sorts of Impulse triggers from very short white noise bursts to full test tone sweeps to get some variation.
Hope that wasn't overly complex or wordy and it helps. Mostly, have fun with it.
I have used the Fostex 6301Bs with very good results for IR recording. They're pretty flat on the EQ side, don't use much power, and are very portable.
Not sure what's "best", but that's what I use. A lot of the responses here are very good.
It's not a bad idea to get a measurement mic and do some testing on your speakers. It can help you EQ your worldizing recording to keep it accurate to the original.
